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Mine is a small voice

I was flipping through the cable news networks looking for some details on the reports of a shooting at Fort Hood, TX. That story seems to have been a domestic dispute or something similar, not another act of terrorism. But I stopped briefly at MSNBC and caught a brief segment on “the ED show”.

Ed Schultz was interviewing someone I didn’t recognize, asking (or was it lecturing?) them about Christine O’Donnell and the Tea Parties. “Isn’t Christine O’Donnell your [GOP] worst nightmare?” “You’re embracing the Witchcraft candidate!” And later, “How are you going to control these Tea Parties?”

And suddenly it dawned on me why the Left and the Main Stream Media so vociferously oppose the Tea Parties: They don’t get it. They don’t comprehend the idea of a political movement that doesn’t come from a party structure. They can’t conceive of a political movement that wasn’t born in the mind of a 40-year veteran political strategist living inside the Beltway with all his cronies.

Yet the Tea Parties are just that. My voice combines with yours. Our voices combine with another. A cacaphony of voices questioning the direction of our government and the media that so readily abandons its duty to question those in power.

But this small group of voices was at first ignored. “It’s just a few Right Wing nuts,” the media said. “They’re nothing to be concerned about.” But the number of voices grew. Like a being in a crowded restaurant or night club, it was difficult to distinguish the voices, even though each was talking about something different. Taxes. Spending. Regulations. Jobs. Each person had a different issue, a different viewpoint they were talking about. There was no centralized message, no sound-bite that explained it all for everyone.

So the growing cresendo of voices has become so powerful that they simply can’t be ignored. Like a wave, our voices have been washing against the shores of the political establishment, eroding the foundations of support for the political elites. Names like Nikki Haley and Sharon Angle bucked the established beliefs about what was “normal” in America. Earlier this month, Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell reinforced that trend.

To the Left, these Tea Parties are just upsetting the apple cart. “How can you support a candidate that once dabbled in Witchcraft?! There are serious issues here people!!! Michelle Obama wants you to eat less salt!!1!1!!!”

In fact, yes, there are serious issues here. People can’t find jobs because businesses won’t hire anybody. Businesses won’t hire anybody because tax rates are about to rise. Taxes have to rise to pay for the massive increases in spending. New regulations have to be added to ensure people pay their taxes. New programs we can’t afford have to be added because people can’t find jobs to pay for their daily lives. It’s a cycle that can be solved, and the Tea Parties are looking for anyone who will work stop the cycle.

So our voices are, finally, heard. My small voice is like a water molecule. It combines with others until it forms a raindrop. These drops combine with millions of others like them and grow into a wave. But the Left can’t understand why this wave is so strong when, from their perspective, no force is causing it. So they ask the Right, “How will you control this?” Some on the Right assure the Left that, “We’ll find a way. We’ll deal with this.” But others understand the truth: “We don’t control this. No one controls this. Because no one can. You brought this upon yourselves. You, the Left and the Establishment Right, are what powers it. Your policies. Your decisions. You made this happen, and now you can’t stop it.”

And that has always been the power of the Tea Party movement: No one controls it. Like a surfer, the candidates merely ride the wave. The establishment, on the Left and the Right, is simply in the way of this wave. Others are pretenders, and when the wave gets too powerful, they will fall off and be replaced with someone who can ride it. But unlike an ocean wave, this is one that never reaches shore. It weakens, it strengthens, it ebbs and flows, but there is no final beach where it must crash.

My small voice, on its own, is meaningless. I don’t have a platform of thousands or millions of listeners upon which I stand to shout over everyone else. Yet I speak. I speak because when I’ve changed just one mind, when I’ve opened just one person to change their way of thinking, I’ve just become the most important person in this nation. When you speak and open the eyes of someone who doesn’t yet know the truth, your voice becomes the most important in the country. When our voices combine to change the whole nation, perhaps the world, each of our voices is shown to be more important than the voice of the most popular evening news anchor or the most powerful politician.

Use your small voice. We have won some primaries. That’s just the start. We have a general election to win. Don’t let the Left ridicule or scare you into silence.